GSOC proposal and patch

Google Summer of Code, an opportunity to learn and work with great great developers working in real time open source projects, is really a big motivation for students to work hard towards learning programming. This time is very crucial for every student applying for this contest and I am one of them. Choosing a community from an extra large list and then writing a proposal for the project according to your interest and capability and too under a limited period of time is really an hectic process. Hectic but Interesting! Getting so many things to know in such a short duration is really a wonderful experience. Moreover interacting with such great community members through IRC and mailing lists, not only enhance your knowledge but also gives you confident of being one of them.
After spending a long time and discussing with some friends, I finally decided to put proposal in two communities OpenSCAD and Systers. I put introductory mail in both the mailing list but due to delayed response from Systers, I first compiled OpenSCAD and then started looking into their project list. But before that, it was important to submit a patch to show the community your work. So I looked into issues list and chose one i.e. categorizing examples of OpenSCAD. It was tagged under GUI. OpenSCAD had examples named as Example001, Example002 and so on. Such type of nomenclature can be a problem for users and he can’t guess the functions of the example through its name and may have to run all of them to know that. Also the size of the menu was too big to add more examples. So it was required to name those examples according to their functions and also to categorize them. So I took few days to complete that as I couldn’t give regular time due to tests and assignments submission in the college. These days included understanding few files of code to fit my code in, learning Qt, and discussion with community members.
The next task was to submit proposal. From the list of projects, I chose OpenSCAD UI brushup according to my interest. As the proposal requires detail description of each task you are going to complete during your coding period. I had to study a lot about existing OpenSCAD features, observed about things that were missing, read about different editors, and color theory for rendered models, toolbars etc.
So finally I submitted my proposal successfully before time so as to take feedback from community. After the submission of the proposal, I completed the task of categorizing examples and submitted that too. That patch has been accepted and today it is the part of OpenSCAD code 🙂